IV. The Work of the Spider I
Turn the fire on!” said Kerekes, the farmer. Autumnal horse-flies were buzzing round the cracked lampshade, describing drowsy figures of eight in its weak light, time and again colliding with the filthy porcelain, so that after each dull little thud their bodies fell back into the magnetic paths they themselves had woven, to continue this endless cycle, albeit on a tight closed circuit until the light went out; but the compassionate hand that had the power to undertake such action was still supporting the unshaven face. The landlord’s ears were full of the sounds of the rain that never seemed to want to stop, and he was watching the horseflies through sleepy eyes, blinking and muttering: “Devil take the lot of you.” Halics was sitting in the corner by the door on an iron-framed if rather unsteady chair, his waterproof coat buttoned up to the chin, a coat that, if he wished to sit down at all, he had to raise to groin level because the fact was the rain and wind had not spared either him or his coat, disfiguring and softening them both, Halics’s whole body felt as though it had lost definition and, as for his coat, it had lost whatever resistance to water it once had nor could it protect him from the roaring cataract of fate, or, as he tended to say, “the rain of death in the heart,” a rain that beat, day and night, against both his withered heart and defenseless organs. The pool of water around his boots was growing every wider, the empty glass in his hand was growing heavier, and however he tried not to hear, there, behind him, his elbows propped on the so-called “billiards table” and his sightless eyes turned to the landlord, was Kerekes, slurping his beer slowly through his teeth, then greedily swallowing it with great glugs. “I said turn it on. .” he repeated, then turned his head slightly to the right so he should not miss a single sound. The smell of mold rising from the floor at the corners of the room surrounded the vanguard cockroaches working their way down the back walls, with the main cockroach army following them to swarm across the oily floor. The landlord responded with an obscene gesture, meeting Halics’s watery eyes with a sly, conspiratorial smile, but hearing the farmer’s words of warning (“Don’t point, shit face!”) he shrank back in the chair with fright. Behind the tin-topped counter a poster spotted with lime bloomed at a crooked angle on the wall while on the far side, beyond the circle of light emanating from the lamp, next to a faded Coca-Cola ad stood an iron clothes-hook with a dusty forgotten hat and work-coat dangling from it, the coat stiff as an airborne statue; anyone glancing at it might have mistaken it for a hanged man. Kerekes started off in the direction of the landlord, an empty bottle in his hand. The floor creaked under him and he pitched slightly forward, his enormous body looming above everything else. For a moment he was like a bull springing over a fence: he seemed to occupy every available inch of space. Halics saw the landlord disappear behind the stockroom door and heard him quickly shoot the bolt and, frightened as he was, because something had actually happened, Halics took some consolation in realizing that, for once, he did not have to take shelter behind the towering sacks of artificial fertilizer that years ago had been piled one on top of another and had never been moved, or between rows of garden implements and containers of foul-smelling pigswill with his back up against the ice-cold steel door, and he even felt a certain flutter of joy, or maybe just a smidgeon of satisfaction at the thought that the master of all that store of glittering wine was now cowering behind locked doors, desperately waiting for some reassuring sound, his life threatened by the powerfully built farmer. “Another bottle!” Kerekes angrily demanded. He pulled a fistful of paper money from his pocket, but having moved too fast he dropped the money — which, after a moment of dignified drifting in the air, landed right next to his enormous boots. Because he was aware — if only briefly — of the rules governing the actions of other persons, the degree to which they were predictable or unpredictable, and knowing what he himself should most certainly do, Halics rose, waited a few seconds to see whether the farmer would bend down to retrieve the cash, cleared his throat, then went over, took out his own last few dimes and opened his palm. The coins clinked as they ran all over the place, then — as the very last one finally settled — he knelt down on the floor to gather them up. “Pick up my hundred too,” Kerekes boomed at him and Halics, knowing the ways of the world (“. . I can see right through you!”), silently, obediently, slavishly, picked up the money and handed it over, all the time brimming with hatred. “It was just the denomination he got wrong!. .” he said to himself, still frightened. “Just the denomination.” Then, at a gruff question from the farmer (“So, where are you?!”) he sprang to his feet, brushed his knees down and hopefully, since he couldn’t be certain whether the farmer was addressing the landlord or him, leaned against the bar at a safe distance from Kerekes, who — was it possible? — appeared to be hesitating, so that when Halics finally spoke his frail, hardly audible voice (“Well, how long do we have to wait?”) reverberated in the silence and could not be retracted. Nevertheless, obliged as he was to be standing near someone as physically powerful as Kerekes and having distanced himself as far as he could from the words he had so carelessly uttered, he felt he had forged some vague comradeship with Kerekes, the only sort of which he was capable, not only because of his easily wounded self-regard but because his very cells protested against the possibility that he should behave differently from any other coward: terrified complicity was the only available option. By the time the farmer slowly turned to him the obligation to remain loyal, something that had long been part of Halics’s character, had given way to something else: he felt oddly moved in discovering that a stray remark of his should have hit the mark. It was so unexpected. He wasn’t prepared to find that his own voice — the voice in which he had just spoken, a voice not in the least prepared — could deflect and, to some degree, neutralize the farmer’s clear surprise, so he quickly, as a sign of immediate and unconditional withdrawal, added: “Though of course, it’s nothing to do with me. .” Kerekes was beginning to lose his temper again. He lowered his head and registered the fact that there before him on the counter stood a row of washed wine glasses: he had just raised his fist when, at that precise moment, the landlord emerged from the stockroom and stood on the threshold. He rubbed his eyes and leaned against the doorframe, the two minutes spent at the back of his emporium being sufficient to wipe away his sudden and, when you came to consider it, ridiculous, panic (“How aggressive he is! Damn animal!”), so the damage to his self-esteem could be only skin-deep after all, nothing really serious, and, if the big farmer did get under his skin, it was simply “another stone dropped down a bottomless well.” “Another bottle!” Kerekes demanded, and put the money down on the counter. And seeing how the landlord was still keeping a careful distance, added, “Don’t be afraid, you idiot. I won’t hurt you. Just stop pointing.” By the time he returned to his chair at the “billiard table” and sat down carefully for fear of someone pulling the chair out from under him, the landlord’s chin was propped on his other hand, his whey-colored foxy eyes clouded over with uncertainty and a sort of tangible longing, his fingers long, refined, and polished with long years of laboring on the periphery of that same palm, his shoulders fallen in, his belly a conspicuous paunch, not a muscle of his body moving apart from the toes inside his well-worn shoes: all in the close warmth of perpetual servility — the kind of servility that renders the skin torpid and the palm sweaty — shining from his white-as-chalk face. Then the lamp that had been hanging motionless from the ceiling began to sway and its narrow aureole of light — no bigger than a slice of bread — that left most of the ceiling and the tops of the walls in shadow, offering only enough light to see the three men, the cookies, the dried noodles for soup, the counter covered with wine glasses and bottles of